A History of the Amiga, Part 2: the Birth of Amiga

“When it first arrived, the Amiga was a dream machine, and some have said it was ten years ahead of its time. The second installment of our series on the history of the Amiga picks up with the birth of the company and the appearance of the first Amiga PC.”

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Jay had always had a passion for flight simulators, and it was something that would stay with him for the rest of his life. A friend of his took him on a field trip to Link, a company that made multimillion-dollar flight simulators for the military. Jay was enthralled by the realistic sights and sounds and vowed that he would make the Amiga computer capable of playing the best flight simulators possible.

Imagine, a state-of-the-art computer system whose capabilities (much admired even today as far ahead of their time) were fueled by the designer wanting something that could play great state-of-the-art games!

Imagine, a state-of-the-art computer system whose capabilities (much admired even today as far ahead of their time) were fueled by the designer wanting something that could play great state-of-the-art games!

Many of today’s custom sytems are clearly designed around the needs of the gaming community. A good example of this is Alienware.

I was stationed in Japan when the Amiga came out and it was an instant hit. They were sold as soon as they came in it seemed. Very affordable with lots of third-party support for software & a fantastic array of third-party peripherals to drool over.

The opinion then was that the Amiga was very ahead of

Many of the games developed for the Amiga were great. One game, Hybris, was a great favorite of mine.

one of the first games i played on my A500 was A/F-18 interceptor. and i still have memories of hearing my tv (yep, i used a tv) spit out top gun theme whenever i fired up that game.

and that blue code wheel i almost a collectors item in my mind. those are the days when the copy protections where as much a part of the game as the game itself, like having to look up words from the manual. and those where some detailed manuals. like the one i have for my B-17 sim, one of the last games i got for my A500. full of images and historical info about how the bombings where performed and guided. hell, the game even came with a microprose sweater

i guess one can kinda say that gaming and home computers have been linked as far back as the days of the C64 at least.

hell, today ms is trying to leverage their directx game development framework to sell vista.

its the home computing platform thats the premier gaming platform that will sell the most, no question about it.

so it becomes a chicken and egg thing, yet again. the more games that are on a platform, the more people will consider buying it. and the more people are buying it, the more game producers will create games for it.

but now, if i stay away from the early 3d games, i can play most of the old dos age games in dosbox, on linux

and people use linux to play wow. but thats thru that wine offshot, not native

Who needs documentaries when you can go to http://www.archive.org and watch old episodes of the computer chronicles. They had tonnes of product reviews and showcased ideas that we would think of as quaint today.

Or head over to Google Video and look for the “Computer History Museum”, which offers a series of talks by notable figures in computer history.

There are documentaries on computer history out there. Some more popular, some more specific. I think that one such documentary is shipped with Amiga Forever.

I remember when I started playing some of the old console games on PC simulators, I wanted to try Amiga games, but was told that while simulators existed they still couldn’t simulated an Amiga at full speed. Because while the CPU was super slow, all the decicated hardware was very hard simulate. That was in 2000, so it says a lot of how powerfull the Amiga was.

But now 6 years later, are there any good Amiga simulators today? I wanno play SuperFrog!

uae is a decent amiga emulator but it still requires you to get hold of the rom files from a real amiga to use legally.

also it wont mimic the smoothness the amiga had as windows will still have it hick ups, freezing cursor ect which means you wont ever get the true amiga feeling- but i believe it should play superfrog.

I dunno. There’s a lot of innovative stuff out there (excellent puzzlers, innovative beat and “adventure” games) as well as well executed and extended older ideas. Unfortuantley it all seems to be on the DS!

There’s probably quite a lot of truth in that last sentence. I sure wouldn’t want to develop for PS3 or even 360 – the costs are astronomical (How many artists?? and you want a full orchestra for the score? AND you want a custom game engine… EESH!)

Also. I don’t know why I said “unfortuantely on the DS”. I’ve a DS so it’s all good with me!

I sure wouldn’t want to develop for PS3 or even 360 – the costs are astronomical

For the record, the XBox 360 XNA system allows you, the private bedroom coder, to develop games that take pretty good advantage of the hardware. XNA is probably one of those few systems where you can get a game in front of all XBox Live users.

However the true bedroom coder, who could make a real main stream game on a main stream platform is probably gone for now, moving on to cheap flash browser games, quickly forgotten again after a few months.

DS? Are you talking about the rehash of Tetris? Mario Karts again? Super Mario Bros again? Pokemon red? yellow? pink? green? The games that barely make actual use of the touch screen (exception – the annoying use if it during boss battles in Castlevania)? The DS being a rehashed DS phat? Wow, now that is innovation!!

The C64 had all kinds of crazy games from back when non-professional-game houses made games. I remember one crazy text-graphics game where you drilled oil wells… that was cool. Today’s games require artists and typically suffer from a lack of originality. M.U.L.E. was way-cool, but I think it was professionals.

G’Z! Turn down the negativity! 😉 Try Ouendan, Phoenix Wright, Advance Wars DS (yeah, you COULD argue it’s a rehash but DAMN it’s a good one), Picross, Puzzle League and soon you’ll get Zelda (which seems to have some diamond use of the touch screen) and plenty more.

Flip side is you can’t really accuse the Big N of a lack of innovation when it comes to Pokemon. Yup, they’re rehashed games but with the number of people that want to buy them they’d be made not to release them.

TBH, I think many of us view the past (late 70’s and early 80’s) with rose tinted glasses. The problem being that the filter of time has eliminated the crap leaving only the gems being replayed as I seem to recall endless platformers (1000s) that only differed by sprites and map. That and Space Invader/Galaxian clones. Millions of them.

That said, there was genuine innovation, my recollection of the Spectrum software library turns up some real gems.

It’s a nonInternet operating system designed to do what a Commodore did, but on modern PC hardware. It has crappy graphics (640x480x16 color), but is really simple to program and has many Commodore features: